Sunday, May 5, 2013

Iran called on the region to unite against Israel after a reported attack on Syria and said it was ready to train the Damascus government's army.

Israel carried out its second air strike in days on Syria early on Sunday, targeting Iranian-supplied missiles headed for Lebanon's Hezbollah, a Western intelligence source said.

Tehran on Sunday denied the attack was aimed at "its missiles destined for Hezbollah resistance fighters in Lebanon," according to the Islamic state's English-language Press TV.

Iran has supported its ally Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his efforts to suppress a rebellion that has raged for more than two years and which Tehran and Damascus say is being waged by Western-backed "terrorists".

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast urged countries in the region to stand against the "assault", the Fars news agency reported on Sunday.

Iranian army ground forces commander Ahmad Reza Pourdastan said on Sunday Iran was ready to support its ally.

More than 20 percent of Taipei first-graders suffer from asthma and 50 percent of them have allergic rhinitis, the Taiwan Association of Asthma Education said yesterday.

Ahead of World Asthma Day tomorrow, the association and the Taipei City Government Department of Health held a fair yesterday to promote asthma and allergy prevention.

Association chairwoman Huang Li-hsin (黃立心) said a recent survey conducted by the group found that while about 50 percent of Taiwanese experience allergy symptoms, 60 percent of those polled believe they are not allergic to anything.

“According to surveys done over the past three years by the city government, about 50 percent of the first-graders in Taipei have allergic rhinitis, 20 percent have asthma and nearly 10 percent suffer from atopic dermatitis,” Huang said.

However, a Bureau of Health Promotion official said that a more disconcerting phenomenon is that, according to statistics compiled by the bureau, of those who were been diagnosed with asthma in 2009, 72.4 percent have failed to visit doctors regularly in the past year.

n his new book, The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism, investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson analyzes 10 years of terrorism cases that were prosecuted in the United States after Sept. 11.

By assembling a database of the cases and going through court records, he concluded that the FBI, which receives $3 billion per year for counterterrorism, is "the organization responsible for more terrorist plots over the last decade than any other."

Rather than stopping actual terrorist attacks, like the Boston bombing, the FBI focuses significant resources on using informants and sting operations to entrap would-be Islamic terrorists who "never could have obtained the capability to carry out their planned violent acts were it not for the FBI's assistance," he writes in his book.

Aaronson, the co-director of the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, spoke to CBC News by phone from Florida.

Colossal numbers of cicadas, unhurriedly growing underground since 1996, are about to emerge along much of the U.S. East Coast to begin passionately singing and mating as their remarkable life cycle restarts.

This year heralds the springtime emergence of billions of so-called 17-year periodical cicadas, with their distinctive black bodies, buggy red eyes, and orange-veined wings, along a roughly 900-mile stretch from northern Georgia to upstate New York.

The eerie, cacophonous mating music they produce, along with the unusual synchronous mass emergence and lengthy development cycles, have amazed scientists and lay people alike for centuries.

A small plane has crashed into a residential building in Valencia, the capital of Carabobo state in west-central Venezuela. Two people are said to be dead. It remains unknown whether people inside the building were injured.

Interior Minister Miguel Rodriguez Torres confirmed the death of the two people, identifying them as "the pilot, Captain Luis Alfredo Maldonado and co-pilot, Captain Rodolfo Enrique Di Lena Diaz, who both died in the accident."

A twin-engine plane with a capacity of eleven people crashed for unknown reasons at 10.30 local time (15:00 GMT), in an area about 3 kilometers from the international airport of Valencia Arturo Michelena.

Five samples taken from poultry and the environment in three east China provinces have tested positive for the H7N9 avian flu virus, the Ministry of Agriculture said on Sunday.

The virus, which has killed at least 27 people thus far, was detected in three samples of the environment taken from Shandong Province and two samples of chicken from Jiangxi and Guangdong provinces.

The Shandong samples were taken from poultry waste at a local market in the city of Zaozhuang. The chicken samples were taken from a vendor in Jiangxi's Nanchang County and a wholesale market in Guangdong's city of Dongguan.

Sometimes, normal humans take a liking to clinical terms and adopt them.

You go out on a date, and when your friends ask how it went you reply: "Oh, she's psychotic." Or perhaps: "He's delusional."

The justifications for such adjectives being used might be simple.

In the former case, the lady might have asked, just as the main course plates were cleared away, where the gentleman thought the relationship was going. This was after having described the details of her previous 17 relationships.

In the latter case, the gentleman might have talked about himself throughout the meal and offered mathematical details about his mental and physical prowess.

However, when these words are used in a clinical context, they have more precise definitions.

Which is why I have been moved to contemplation on hearing news of research from Israel. It declared that Facebook and its ilk can move the vulnerable (which might mean anyone) in the direction of psychosis and delusion.

Eight months ago, Cody Wilson set out to create the world’s first entirely 3D-printable handgun.

Now he has.

Early next week, Wilson, a 25-year-old University of Texas law student and founder of the non-profit group Defense Distributed, plans to release the 3D-printable CAD files for a gun he calls “the Liberator,” pictured in its initial form above. He’s agreed to let me document the process of the gun’s creation, so long as I don’t publish details of its mechanics or its testing until it’s been proven to work reliably and the file has been uploaded to Defense Distributed’s online collection of printable gun blueprints at Defcad.org.

All sixteen pieces of the Liberator prototype were printed in ABS plastic with a Dimension SST printer from 3D printing company Stratasys, with the exception of a single nail that’s used as a firing pin. The gun is designed to fire standard handgun rounds, using interchangeable barrels for different calibers of ammunition.

Two foreign rioters jailed for their part in England's civil unrest two years ago have foiled attempts to deport them by citing their human right to 'family life'.

The successful appeals by Ubong-Luke Nkanta, of south-east London, and a second man, who has been granted anonymity, defy the Government's pledge to deport any foreign national convicted over the 2011 disturbances.

Critics say the decisions sharply contradict official efforts to take exemplary action against those involved in the outbreaks of violence in London and elsewhere that summer.

Israel has carried out airstrikes against Syria twice in the past three days, targeting what officials say are shipments of highly accurate, Iranian-made guided missiles known as Fateh-110s.

They were believed to be on their way to Lebanon's Hezbollah militant group before Israel warplanes have bombed a military facility near the Syrian capital of Damascus shaking the city with powerful blasts.

Columns of fire lit the night sky after Israeli rockets hit the the same Jamraya military research centre they struck in January.

Israeli jets bombed Syria on Sunday, rocking Damascus for hours and sending pillars of flame into the night sky in what a Western source called a new strike on Iranian missiles bound for Lebanon's Hezbollah.

Local people reported massive explosions and internet video showed the capital's skyline lit by flashes; Syrian opponents of President Bashar al-Assad rejoiced at Israel's third raid this year, and second in 48 hours, while anger in Tehran highlighted how Syria's civil war risks spinning further beyond its borders.

Israel, while declining to confirm the strike, stressed its focus was to deny its Lebanese foes new Iranian firepower and not take sides between Assad, long seen as a toothless adversary, and rebels who have won sympathy from Israel's Western allies but who also include al Qaeda Islamists hostile to the Jewish state.

It appears to calculate that Assad will not risk forces he needs to fight the rebels by attacking a much stronger Israel.

Three Chinese government ships have sailed into the waters of disputed Tokyo-controlled islands, according to Japan's coastguard.

The maritime surveillance ships entered the 12-nautical-mile zone off the Senkaku islands, which China calls the Diaoyu, about 11am (0200 GMT) on Sunday.

Chinese government ships have frequently sailed around the five islands in recent months, causing diplomatic clashes with Japan.

In late April, eight Chinese government vessels sailed into the disputed waters, the biggest flotilla in a single day since Tokyo nationalised part of the island chain in September.

The decision caused an angry response, with Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pledging to "expel by force" any Chinese landing on the archipelago, which is believed to harbour vast natural resources below its seabed.

Israeli jets bombed Syria on Sunday, rocking Damascus for hours and sending pillars of flame into the night sky in what a Western source called a new strike on Iranian missiles bound for Lebanon's Hezbollah.

Local people reported massive explosions and internet video showed the capital's skyline lit by flashes; Syrian opponents of President Bashar al-Assad rejoiced at Israel's third raid this year, and second in 48 hours, while anger in Tehran highlighted how Syria's civil war risks spinning further beyond its borders.

Israel, while declining to confirm the strike, stressed its focus was to deny its Lebanese foes new Iranian firepower and not take sides between Assad, long seen as a toothless adversary, and rebels who have won sympathy from Israel's Western allies but who also include al Qaeda Islamists hostile to the Jewish state.

It appears to calculate that Assad will not risk forces he needs to fight the rebels by attacking a much stronger Israel.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives plunged to their lowest rating in seven months in a leading opinion poll on Sunday as a tax evasion scandal embroiled an ally and their Bavarian sister party faced questions about nepotism.

Support for Merkel's Christian Democrats and Bavarian partner the Christian Social Union fell three percentage points from a week earlier to 37 percent, their lowest ranking since October, the Emnid poll for Bild am Sonntag newspaper showed.

Last month, one of Germany's most admired sports managers, Bayern Munich president Uli Hoeness, said he had voluntarily reported himself to authorities in a tax evasion investigation that exposed Merkel's government to criticism it is lenient on tax cheats.

It's harvest time in Egypt but the secular opposition is reaping scant benefit from the Muslim Brotherhood's difficulties in government, two years after an Arab Spring uprising swept away President Hosni Mubarak.

Many Egyptians are looking to the army, or to more radical Salafi Muslim groups, rather than to liberal or leftist parties as Islamist President Mohamed Mursi and his cabinet struggle to revive a sick economy, restore security and build institutions.

Perhaps the greatest threat to Egypt's faltering transition to democracy may come not from what the Brotherhood's critics regard as its attempts to grab as many powers as possible, but from the inability of a weak and fragmented secular opposition to offer a coherent alternative.

A top-secret timeline from inside the Obama administration shows how the U.S. government heavily altered talking points about the Benghazi consulate attack that left four Americans dead, despite having clear intelligence reports from Libya indicating that an al Qaeda-linked terror group 'claimed credit' for destroying the diplomatic outpost.

According to a report scheduled for publication May 13 in The Weekly Standard, Deputy CIA Director Mike Morrell cut or changed four of the six paragraphs - removing 148 of the 248 words - in a classified assessment of what happened in Benghazi on September 11, 2012.

The Weekly Standard released its article online Thursday, likely to make it public before a May 8 House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing about the terror attack.

Serious offenders – potentially including rapists and even killers – could be let off with a warning and a £150 fine under new ‘soft justice’ laws brought in by the back door, magistrates warned last night.

Ministers have agreed that ‘conditional cautions’ – those involving a fine or community punishment – can be handed out for offences that should be dealt with by the crown courts.

This is despite the Government publicly promising last month to stop serious criminals escaping with just a slap on the wrist.

The law, which came into force last month without any public discussion, was uncovered by ‘horrified’ magistrates. They are now demanding to know why rules were relaxed.

The Royal Navy has been blamed for driving dozens of dolphins to an agonising death during anti-submarine war games.

A four-year investigation by scientists has ruled out every other cause for the UK’s largest stranding of common dolphins in shallows off the coast of Cornwall in 2008.

At the time, the area was hosting a week of ‘live fire’ war games involving 20 Royal Navy ships, helicopters and submarines – including the nuclear-powered sub HMS Torbay – as well as 11 foreign vessels.

And scientists now believe trials of anti-submarine warfare techniques, using a range of mid-frequency sonar devices in the water to detect hidden vessels, were the most likely cause of the dolphins’ deaths.

A new type of "quadruple reassortant" virus with a mixture of genes from four flu strains found in birds led to the H7N9 bird flu outbreak, researchers said yesterday.

One of those genes of the strain is likely to have come from migratory birds in East Asia, and the H7 influenza virus was later transmitted to ducks in the Yangtze River Delta region during migration, said researchers with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and universities.

The possible source of another gene was migratory birds. Another six gene segments are traceable to chickens in Shanghai and Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces, and the H9N2 virus.

If we ignore Jerusalem’s deafening silence and accept the foreign media’s assumption that Israel was behind two aerial attacks in Syria within less than 48 hours, we must assume that there was something near Damascus that Israel urgently felt it had to keep from being transferred to Hezbollah.

For 40 years, Israel has seen Syria as a heavyweight foe, but one usually held in check by the deterrence Israel created to prevent a military attack. Suddenly, we have shifted to a pace of attacks more characteristic of the operations in Gaza or Lebanon.

According to the New York Times, the reason for the attack was a shipment of Iranian-made Fateh-110 missiles that was on its way to Lebanon. The disturbing thing about these missiles is not their range, but their accuracy. The Fateh-110 missile could be the most accurate weapon Hezbollah has.

Clashes between rival ethnic groups have killed at least 30 people in eastern Nigeria's Taraba state since they erupted on Friday, police said.

Members of the Jukun ethnic group were marching through the small commercial town of Wukari to a funeral, when an argument broke out with local Hausa and Fulani youths, which quickly degenerated into pitched battles with guns and machetes. Attackers also set fire to around 30 houses, police said.

"Now we are in full control, although the crisis claimed 30 lives," police spokesman for Taraba state Joseph Kwaji said, adding that 40 suspects have been arrested.

The Venezuelan government's suggestion that an American citizen it has detained is a spy is "ridiculous," U.S. President Barack Obama said in a television interview recorded on Saturday during a visit to Costa Rica.

Venezuela said late last month it had detained an American called Timothy Hallet Tracy, accusing him of financing opposition student demonstrations after April's disputed presidential election and saying he had clearly been trained as an intelligence agent.

Venezuela said Tracy, 35, from Michigan, had received money from a foreign non-profit organization and had redirected those funds toward student organizations, seeking to provoke "civil war".

"We actually have a pretty good marine layer, which is like thick fog on the coast moving inland, cooler temperatures and higher humidity," Captain Dan Horgon of the Ventura County Fire Department told Reuters.

"That coupled with our efforts out there with our firefighters have made the situation quite a bit better," he said.

Two First Nations and a rural municipality have been added to the list of Saskatchewan communities under flood emergencies.

The James Smith First Nation, the Cowessess First Nation and the regional municipality of Fish Creek bring the total number of communities that have declared emergencies to 13.

"We're still seeing in the rural areas significant impact to infrastructure such as roads either overtopping or having to be cut, so most of the rural municipalities are still facing some challenges," Duane McKay, Saskatchewan's commissioner of emergency management, said Saturday.

Highway 3, just west of Spiritwood, was closed Saturday because of flooding.

Meanwhile, the Water Security Agency said sandbagging and other efforts to keep the water out of the town of Radisson, northwest of Saskatoon, were holding.

An afternoon fire near the southwest corner of the city destroyed a large area of grass and trees, and the resulting smoke could be seen from kilometres away.

Calgary fire crews were called to the 3400 block of 146 Ave. S.W. just after 2:00 p.m. Saturday afternoon. On arrival, firefighters determined the fire was on Tsuu T'ina land and a building was being threatened by the flames.

Alaska’s Cleveland Volcano is undergoing a continuous low-level eruption following an explosion early Saturday morning, scientists from the Alaska Volcano Observatory and the U.S. Geological Survey said.

Satellites and cameras suggest low-level emissions of gas, steam and ash, scientists said, and satellites detected highly elevated surface temperatures at the summit. A faint plume of ash extended eastward below 15,000 feet, but the Federal Aviation Administration said there were no flight restrictions as a result.

“Sudden explosions of blocks and ash are possible with little or no warning,” scientists said. “Ash clouds, if produced, could exceed 20,000 feet above sea level.”

At least 403 people were affected while 27 houses were destroyed after a tornado barreled through four villages in Tarlac province Friday, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council said Saturday evening.

In a report posted on its website Saturday evening, the NDRRMC said the tornado occurred at 3 p.m. in Paniqui town and affected Ventinilla, Cabayaasan, Tablang and Salumangue villages.

The report said the tornado affected 101 families or 403 people, including 86 families (346 people) in Ventinilla, 10 families (43 people) in Salumangue, three famiies (six people) in Cabayaasan, and two families (eight people) in Tablang.